Luckily It Rarely Happens

I got a very nice email from somebody who bought 4 skeins (“the whole lot the store had”) of my yarn at Six Loose Ladies. Asking if I had any more. I had to tell her that all my colors are really one of a kind. “I love all the colors and how they work together. The yarn is thick and so nice to touch.” she said. It’s a crazy feeling, when someone likes something you did that much, and you don’t think it’s that great at all. Kind of a cognitive dissonance.

Can You Camus

The other night I was picking up Vietnamese takeout, like I do every 2-3 weeks. For the first time I noticed a selection of books by the register. I saw DUNE and I saw BEING & NOTHINGNESS by Jean Paul Sartre, which is quite a hefty tome. When Michael came back – the kid who always runs the front of the house, it’s a family place – I say “kid” but I haven’t the foggiest how old he is, just younger than me – I said, “That’s quite a selection of books you have there.” He said, “I get bored,” in his deadpan way. I said, “Jean Paul Sartre!?” He said, “Yeah, I think I have MYTH OF SISYPHUS back there too… It just helps to know that existential dread goes back a long way.”

MYTH OF SISYPHUS is a book by Albert Camus, but the actual myth was that Sisyphus was doomed to roll a boulder uphill, only to have it roll back down again, for all eternity. If I’d had my wits about me, the next thing I would have said was, “Is your job like rolling a boulder uphill for all eternity? Handing out those phos and spring rolls, over and over? Serving that old red-headed chick the exact same damn order, every second Tuesday? Over and over and over?”

I don’t know, you just never think of the guy who packs up your Vietnamese takeout having such a rich inner philosophical life, but why the hell not? I should be the only one who reads Camus?

Book Corner 2022.38

How to Be Perfect

by Michael Schur

Michael Schur is a television comedy writer, and boy does he think he’s funny. He needs to footnote nearly every page with jokes. So, just go with the flow.

This is a fun-filled romp through ethics as philosophized through the ages. We go from Aristotle to Kant to brief divergences into the Existentialists and Ayn Rand; the utilitarians and Peter Singer; the African concept of “ubuntu”; and kind of a letdown of a final chapter on saying you’re sorry and a rambling letter to his two children.

I certainly laughed out loud several times every single reading. But I did not learn how to be perfect.

Let’s Be Natural

Time for an unofficial Be Natural, i.e. an unedited unfiltered photo in both directions. Not that I ever edit or filter photos, but I am known to retake them if I look (too) fat and ugly, which is editing of a sort.

“Today is SOOOOO effin’ hot…”

Damn Sweaty

“How effin’ hot is it???…”

Burlington Bay Market

That even though outdoor seating was available, we stayed in the AC. That is so not me.

Book Corner 2022.36

How the World Really Works

by Vaclav Smil

Numbers fill almost every paragraph of this book, and it was honestly hard not to glaze over a lot. This is the fault of myself and not the book; a book like this is all about numbers, as it’s about facts, how the world “really” works, after all.

The “four pillars of modern civilization” for Smil are: cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia. Overall this book is about that material, tangible, real-world “stuff” of civilization; and Smil casts snarky asides at every opportunity towards microprocessors, smartphones, AI, and anything else that isn’t “stuff.” We need the “stuff”, continuously, and in abundance, and the non-stuff isn’t going to save us.

You might recognize cement, steel, and plastic as literal building blocks of civilization; but just in case you can’t see how ammonia fits into the top four, it’s due to importance as fertilizer. And abundant synthetic fertilizer was a crucial input to Earth’s population boom. Simply put, “nearly 4 billion people would not have been alive without synthetic ammonia.” More existentially important than silicon wafers, to be sure.

Cement? “Yet another [!] astounding statistic is that the world now consumes in one year more cement than it did during the entire first half of the 20th century.”

And as for fossil fuels, and hopes for our conversion to renewable sources of energy? “Until all energies used to extract and process these materials come from renewable conversions, modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on the fossil fuels used in [their] production.” It’s the oil and natural gas that get us all this steel, cement, plastic, and ammonia. Electric cars are great. But renewable electricity is not going to be able to perform the herculean job that fossil fuels do today in terms of producing the material that makes our world go round.

Smil is neither an optimist nor a pessimist, but a scientist, and it comes through. It is refreshing to read someone who neither is gung ho about how we’re gonna solve everything, nor ready to lay down and die. He thinks we’ll muddle through. But here he cuts through the “muddle” of misleading information that comes from both optimists and pessimists.